The social history of work and workers is currently in the paradoxical position of having defined the subject of study in all its rich complexity as never before – a fact borne out by some excellent works – yet fewer and fewer social historians are working on the subject.

Military labor played a key role in conquering and preserving ports as nodes in trading networks. This article treats the military labor of the British occupation of Manila from 1762 to 1764, during the Seven Years War. It examines the motley crew that formed the British forces, exploring British categories of military laborers sent from Madras. The particular combination of forces composed for this expedition had more to do with the East India Company's concerns in Madras than with what was thought to be needed to take and hold Manila. These military laborers were sometimes unruly, insisting on better pay, and deserting when it was not forthcoming. The story of the British occupation of Manila highlights how ideas about desertion traveled along with military laborers from one port city to another in the Indian Ocean world, and what happened when they did.

A prevailing image of the British trade-union movement is that it was insular and slow-moving. The Anglo-Russian Advisory Council of the mid-1920s is an episode apparently difficult to reconcile with this view. In the absence to date of any fully adequate explanation of its gestation, this article approaches the issue biographically, through the TUC's first full-time secretary, Fred Bramley (1874–1925). Themes emerging strongly from Bramley's longer history as a labour activist are, first, a pronouncedly latitudinarian conception of the Labour movement and, second, a forthright labour internationalism deeply rooted in Bramley's trade-union experience. In combining these commitments in the form of an inclusive trade-union internationalism, Bramley in 1924–1925 had the indispensable support of the TUC chairman, A.A. Purcell who, like him, was a former organizer in the small but militantly internationalist Furnishing Trades’ Association. With Bramley's early death and Purcell's marginalization, the Anglo-Russian Committee was to remain a largely anomalous episode in the interwar history of the TUC.

In 1905, dockworkers in Rotterdam harbour organized a great strike against the introduction of machines for the transhipment of grain. The initial success of this strike was a profound shock to the leaders of political parties and national labour organizations, who, in spite of many differences of opinion, shared a positive attitude towards mechanization and regarded strikes against machinery as reactionary. The conflict in Rotterdam provoked a national debate about the implications of mechanization, which clearly exposed the strains and contradictions in this “dominant ideology of technology”. The article shows how several local labour leaders questioned the legitimacy of this ideology and why they failed in the end to persuade their superiors.

This paper discusses Pietro Gori’s charismatic leadership of the Italian anarchist movement at the turn of the nineteenth century and, in particular, the characteristics of his political communication. After a discussion of the literature on the topic, the first section examines Gramsci’s derogatory observations on the characteristics and success of the communicative style adopted by anarchist activists such as Gori. The second investigates the political project underpinning the kind of “organized anarchism” that Gori championed together with Malatesta. The third section unveils Gori’s communication strategy when promoting this project through those platforms considered by Gramsci as being primary schools of political alphabetization in liberal Italy: trials, funerals, commemorations, and celebrations. Particular attention is devoted to the trials, which effectively demonstrated Gori’s modern political skills. The analysis of Gori’s performance at the trials demonstrates Gramsci’s mistake in identifying Gori simply as one of the champions of political sentimentalism.

With the abolition of the guild system and the rise of a new legal regime based on free contract, a central dilemma emerged in Europe: how to enforce labour control in this new era of individual economic freedom. This article examines how this issue was addressed in the State of Milan, where ideas about freedom of contract championed by state reformers such as Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria were met with continued requests from merchant-manufacturers to apply corporal punishment and threat of imprisonment to ensure workers’ attendance. Analysing the new regulations, the ideological credos of the new regime, and the effectiveness of the reforms as they played out on the ground in the silk industry, this article shows that the chance that labour relations could be managed within a civil law regime appeared to be in direct contrast with the dominant conception of workers’ conditions, in particular their lack of propriety and good faith. As credit-debt bonds and limitations to weavers’ mobility stood as the most effective means to ensure labour coercion, a closer look at the daily interactions in the workshop allows us to shed new light on the rationality of workers’ practices like Saint Monday, cast by contemporary commentators in merely moralistic terms.

This review introduces the broad themes and methods of Maarten Prak's Citizens without Nations and focuses on the author's portrait of actual practices of citizenship in early modern cities of Europe. It highlights the strengths of Prak's study in formidable archival work and broad comparative reading. It points out the central place of practices of poor relief to the building of urban networks of citizenship, drawing out the importance of women in participating in these informal yet critical practices of citizenship. Taking the relationship between provisioning for the poor and community building seriously, and building on Prak's view of Britain's relatively smooth transition from early modern to modern practices of citizenship, the essay speculates on whether England's unusual nationwide poor law (born in the early modern period and exemplifying ideals of citizenship usually associated with “urban republicanism”) played its own critical role in the rise of an integrated nation there.

Coalmining in Brazil began in the mid-nineteenth century in the municipality of São Jerônimo, Rio Grande do Sul, the country’s southernmost state. European workers were brought in and joined Brazilian workers, mostly local peasants with no experience in mining. This article discusses the role played by the immigrants in the making of a working class in the coalfields of southern Brazil. The research on which this article is based draws on numerous sources, including lawsuits and the application forms used to request professional licences. It focuses on ethnic and racial ambiguity, and on political strategies. The identity of the miners in the region is commonly represented as an amalgam of all ethnic groups, but this article shows that this self-propagated solidarity and cohesion among workers had its limits.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, major changes transformed the transport of people and freight in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of Brazil during this period. These transformations involved both technological change, as transport evolved first from carriages and carts to horse-drawn trams and then to electric trams, as well as economic developments, such as the establishment of the first tram companies, many of which became important vehicles for foreign capital to enter Brazil. Although there has been extensive research from various angles into the changes undergone by the city's transport sector, there remains, however, a significant lacuna in the existing literature: the workers involved in that sector. The aim of this article is to analyse the workforce of the urban transport sector in Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century, and to understand the labour that these workers provided, how they were affected by the transformations in the sector, and, at the same time, how they responded to those transformations. During this period, issues such as the connections between free and unfree labour, ethnic conflicts, and work regulation were very important in transport work in Rio de Janeiro, and they are explored in the text.

This article traces the chequered history of the reception of E.P. Thompson in postwar Japan and tries to assess what kind of impact his thoughts and ideas had on the Japanese intellectual world. In so doing, this article will draw on interviews with several academics in Japan from various generations as well as written documents. The article begins with a survey of postwar left-wing politics in Japan, against which background Thompson was introduced as a New Left thinker. It also considers the National History Movement, whose problematic legacy seemed to condition the reception of The Making of the English Working Class in Japan in the 1960s. After exploring the limited reception of The Making among Japanese historians, we witness the more favourable reception of the concept of “moral economy”. The article demonstrates that the rather awkward history of the reception of E.P. Thompson in Japan cannot be understood without referring to the postwar concerns of Japanese intellectuals, concerns that changed fairly dramatically in the course of time.

This article introduces the present Special Theme on the global reception and appropriation of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). It aims to interrogate Thompson’s legacy and potential vitality at a moment of renewed social and intellectual upheavals. It emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary and global reflection on Thompson’s work and impact for understanding how class, nation, and “the people” as subjects of historical inquiry have been repeatedly recast since the 1960s. Examining the course of Thompson’s ideas in Japan and West Germany, South Africa and Argentina, as well as Czechoslovakia and Poland, each of the following five articles in the Special Theme is situated in specific and different locations in the global historiographical matrix. Read as a whole, they show how national historiographies have been products of local processes of state and class formation on the one hand, and transnational transfers of intellectual and historiographical ideas, on the other. They highlight the remarkable ability of Thompsonian social history to inspire new lives in varying national contexts shaped by different formations of race, class, and state.

This article provides a reinterpretation of Stalinism through the lens of Marx's concept of primitive accumulation. It connects a series of defining events that are usually viewed separately – the debates and oppositional movements of the 1920s, industrialization, collectivization, and the “Great Terror” – to the state's need to accumulate capital for development. Using the idea of “primitive socialist accumulation”, first introduced by the Soviet theorist and left oppositionist Evgeny Preobrazhensky, it examines the challenges of building socialism in an underdeveloped, overwhelmingly peasant country. It argues that the emergence of the left and right oppositions in the 1920s and the grain crisis in 1927–1928 resulted from the state's struggle to create a stable balance between rural and urban exchange. The hastily implemented move to collectivize resulted in a cascade of unintended consequences, including a disastrous famine, decrease in food supplies, and a precipitous fall in real wages that impelled record numbers of women into the labor force. Against a background of social instability and discontent, the Kirov murder proved a fearful trigger, igniting fears among Party leaders that ultimately resulted in mass political and social repression. The article is part of a dossier, comprising an introduction and three articles, which offers a new approach to our understanding of socialism in the Soviet Union, China, and Romania.

This article analyses and compares the careers of a group of socialist militants who were active in several regions of Brazil in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. It underscores their similarities and differences with a view to understanding the various ways of being a socialist in that context. This includes examining their wide-ranging activities, the main ideas they upheld, and their role in the development of Brazilian labour laws in the 1930s and 1940s.1

No socialist since Robert Owen has had any excuse for being unaware of the relationship between educational reform and social and political change, and a perception of this relationship was a feature of nineteenth century socialism and liberalism. The attention which the educational principles and policies of socialist, labour, and radical movements in Europe have recently received has thus been well deserved. The socialists have however come off better than those organisations which have been designated as merely “labour”, and two valuable contributions to the literature dealing with Great Britain – Professor Simon's Education and the Labour Movement, 1870–1920, and Dr Reid's article on the Socialist Sunday Schools – are concerned with the programmes and beliefs of left wing socialist bodies, rather than with those of the ideologically more diffuse but politically more important Labour Party. Both these contributions may perhaps profitably be placed in a new perspective by an examination of the attitudes adopted within the Labour Party and within its industrial half-brother the Trades Union Congress, to the problems raised by the content and character, as opposed to the structure and organisation, of the education available to the working class.

G. D. H. Cole has drawn attention to the militancy of the unions outside of the craftsmen's trades in the 1860's. The “class cleavage” which he ascribed to the engineering, shipbuilding and the building trades enabled the skilled men to use their “New Model Unions” as exclusive barriers against dilution by the semi-skilled and labouring classes. In consequence, the Amalgamated Unions had pacific tendencies which were only partially offset by their adoption of a centralised organisation, through which policy making and finance were mainly controlled. Although Cole described the Ironworkers' Union as one of the provincially based Amalgamated Unions, the three main unions which were formed by the ironworkers in the years 1862–3 never really succeeded in amalgamating along the lines described. When they did come together in 1868, after a period of disastrous defeats, the form of amalgamation they adopted resulted in a very weak union. The executive committee insisted upon making all decisions on the use of the strike tactic, but allowed the branches almost complete control over union finances.